I remember being a high school senior, trying to decide what my college major would be. I loved reading, writing, and language, so I decided to study linguistics. Although I envied those kids who were going to college for engineering and would graduate and become engineers – so straightforward! – I didn’t think I could “do” science.

After my freshman year, when I had completed most of my prerequisite courses and began to explore different subtypes of linguistics, I realized that I was drawn to the ones that more closely resembled “hard science”. (If you’re curious, I conducted research and experiments in sociophonetics, which is the study of what human speech sounds mean.) I was analyzing the intricacies of seemingly meaningless consonant sounds, like “shh” or “sss”, and I loved it!

Me presenting my college linguistics research in San Francisco.

Realizing that I could enjoy and be good at “hard science” was in no small part due to my undergraduate advisor, who was a tenured female professor in my department. She was brilliant, kind, and truly cared about my development, and with her guidance, I was able to realize my #NaturalPotential as a researcher.

We need more women mentors like my advisor, because although women fill about half of the jobs in the U.S., they only hold 25% of U.S. STEM jobs. Thankfully, Green Works is here to help girls realize their #NaturalPotential like my advisor helped me with mine.

Check out this adorable video they created about teaching girls that they can have STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers just like boys can!

This post was created in partnership with Green Works. All opinions are my own.

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